Salomon
Perel’s true story of surviving Hitler’s Germany by passing himself off as
an Aryan has been made into a beautifully scaled mini-epic of irony. If you
didn’t know otherwise, you’d swear
Europa
Europa was written with a
sly wink by the foxy Isaac Bashevis Singer—it has his kind of sex-tinged,
wicked, cheeky perversity. Here’s a movie in which the Nazis can’t keep their
lusty hands off a Jew. At the center is so unethnically handsome a
fella—played by Marco Hofschneider—that not only doesn’t he look
Jewish, he doesn’t look German or Polish either. With lustrous dark hair,
cherubic face, he’s a petulant, sexy schlemiel without any outward identity;
it’s his misfitted gentility that attracts and confounds his captors. But
there’s one identifiable feature and it’s the most dangerously definitive
of all—his circumcised penis. Salomon learns early that when the Nazis
discover you’re cut, you’re dead. The panic of terror and discomfort in hiding
the evidence is a funny horror show that affects half the audience—men
physically shift in their seats. (The disguise is somewhat like Singer’s
Yentl The Yeshiva Boy—but without crotch anxiety.)
Hofschneider isn’t much of an actor—he can’t convey the variables of
emotions required of him, and though he’s speaking German and Russian, his
line readings lack conviction, never matching the blissful innocence. In
his defense, had he caught all the right actorish nuances, he wouldn’t have
been the unwitting survivor-hero we find so appealing. When he’s running
away naked, using his hands to cover his Jewish identity, or surrendering
to the Russians, or cavorting in front of a mirror, or is bayonetting a dummy with a Jewish star over its heart, he’s the anxious, terrified young boy
with a severe case of the shpilkes he needs to be. Agnieszka Holland is one
of Poland’s few women filmmakers. Not knowing this, you’d assume the movie
was made by an experienced male director. This is high
compliment—Europa
Europa is another example
of 1991’s bumper crop of confidently directed movies. What kind of diets
were Holland, Oliver JFK Stone, John Boyz in the Hood
Singleton and Ridley Thelma & Louise Scott on?
Holland doesn’t wimp out about Germany’s anti-Semitism—her scenes fulminate
with hate and racism. At the same time we’re surprised at how effectively
unrehashable they are; she captures the pervasiveness of the final solution
without ever going to the crematoria. She even gets into the dumb-dumb humor
of the anti-Semitic dogma about Jewish physicality without it being too
offensive. She loads her movie with some goodies: three fantasy dreams (two
featuring Hitler), a marvellous bit with the Nazis about to be overun by
the advancing Russians, turning their fire on the movie’s hero, and a symbolic
joint urination of two brothers. Holland also covers the basics: just when
you wonder how Salomon will escape detection of his circumcision, out comes
the solution. There is one bad touch—the recurring, faked Nino Rota
music borrowed from The Godfather. Unlike The Nasty
Girl, which is like a Woody Allen home movie (its ending appeals
to those who love his infatuation with psychosis),
Europa Europawas denied an Oscar nomination
and probable win for Best Foreign Picture because Germany refused to enter
it. You know why—the country doesn’t wish to be reminded of its fuddy-duddy
anthropological propaganda, especially since it’s resurging again among its
youth. It’s been until very recently unofficial German policy to avoid its
horrific history in order not to repeat it. That’s what makes
Europa
Europa a double whammy: you
can’t uncut what is so distinctly a part of your heritage, and to try to
is sure to spread an insidious infection that is worse than the humiliating
public cure.